Abstract Quotes
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
William James -
That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.
George Stigler
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The more horrifying the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Paul Klee -
The common willing of a common world is an eminently practical undertaking and not in the least abstract.
Daniel Kemmis -
In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.
Michael Behe -
Some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren't real words-just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations.
Scott Adams -
Constructions of a-rhythmical forms, the clash between concrete and abstract forms... ...The acute angle is passionate and dynamic, expressing will and a penetrating force.
Carlo Carra -
The artist must ask you to think of the world in a different way, and sometimes it's a more abstract way; sometimes it's a completely different kind of colouring.
William Lipscomb
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The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.
Willem de Kooning -
Lenelle Moïse's poems render the abstract - policy, disaster, history, diaspora - specific. Her words make the political not just personal, but corporeal: the beautiful system of the human body as canvas and subject, perfect in all its attendant complications and complexity, and still ruled, undeniably, by a warm, beating heart.
Erin McKeown -
There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.
Nikolai Lobachevsky -
We humans have a wide range of abilities that help us perceive and analyze mathematical content. We perceive abstract notions not just through seeing but also by hearing, by feeling, by our sense of body motion and position. Our geometric and spatial skills are highly trainable, just as in other high-performance activities. In mathematics we can use the modules of our minds in flexible ways - even metaphorically. A whole-mind approach to mathematical thinking is vastly more effective than the common approach that manipulates only symbols.
William Thurston -
Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.
Stephen Dunn -
The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
George Lakoff
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True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.
Baruch Spinoza -
The poetic beauty of Davy's mind never seems to have left him. To that circumstance I would ascribe the distinguishing feature in his character, and in his discoveries,-a vivid imagination sketching out new tracts in regions unexplored, for the judgement to select those leading to the recesses of abstract truth.
Davies Gilbert -
Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.
Benjamin Wiker -
Art is only abstract when you look the other way.
Karen Elizabeth Gordon -
'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract.
Stephen Gaghan
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Where human eyes have never seen, where human beings have never been, I build a world of abstract dreams, and I wait for you.
Sun Ra -
I abstract it in my photographs: I like large planes and spaces, areas of texture and light, like deserts or oceans or monumental places.
Herb Ritts -
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.
Terry Eagleton -
A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.
Paul Klee